July 7th, 2004
As the Cassini probe now orbits Saturn, and following the scientific community's recent 2/3rds-successful exploration of Mars (sadly, for their 1/3rd, the Europeans dropped an expensive but ultimately inert chunk of metal onto that planet), my fascination and enthrallment with scientific research about our neighboring planets has reached my teenaged levels again. I mean, on a purely emotional level, this stuff really stokes my coals.
I can plot out the time that I became fascinated with planetary and stellar phenomena to Christmas 1981, when one of my sisters gave me a five-volume set by Arthur C. Clarke. Science fiction enthusiasts talk frequently about that "sense of wonder" instilled in them by many of the 2nd-generation science fiction authors (Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein perhaps, Dick, et al.) and that sense of wonder gripped me from Christmas Day until it was time to reluctantly go back to high school. I mean, I read these five of his books constantly for the next week or so. And when I finished them all, I started over again.
Well, the discoveries made by the Voyager probes may have started things off for me, since they were around that same time, but the real charge came with Clarke's writing being read contemporaneously with the investigation of Jupiter, Saturn, and later Uranus and Neptune. Throughout my teen years, and, guiltily, even into my university years, I bought and read his books, fiction and non-fiction.
[Sigh] But then adulthood encroached, and things like national budgets, poverty, health care, and other such human constructs entered my consciousness, and I started to believe the nonsense that 3,000 million dollars could be better spent feeding 10,000 poor families for 10 years (or whatever). And I soon believed the same half-thought-out crap that a one-hundred-million-dollar probe is one hundred million dollars sent whizzing out into space, cool science or not. I seemed to forget that engineers and draughtsmen, scientists and specialised construction workers were being paid to build those things--people who buy cars and houses, people who must eat and send their children to schools, paying taxes through their noses everywhere. And I also forgot that the probes were made out of relatively inexpensive materials, not thousand dollar bills glued together. The money is not being swallowed up into the vacuum of space, it's paying highly-trained people to try to do their jobs. I further neglected to realise that money which wasn't spent on space research would not automatically be channelled into poverty-stricken areas of the world, or health care, or something else equally "desperate".
But eventually I thought these things through, and around the time of Pathfinder (1996-1997), my interest perked up again. Then the stunning success of the Galileo probe orbiting Jupiter and its library of photographs and research returned to Earth before its suicide in the atmosphere of that planet. And now I'm back to being enthralled by the pictures of salty rocks on Mars and thousands of Saturnian rings rippling with gravity waves from the shepherding moons.
My sense of wonder is back.
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By the way, if you ever decide you want to read one--and only one--science fiction novel, I recommend Childhood's End by Clarke. I warn literary readers now: The characters are paper thin, the writing frequently pedantic, conversations little more than exposition of humanist ideas, understanding of "human behaviour" mindlessly logical and hopeful, and the plot fragmented and jumpy. But it is also a minor masterpiece that launched a thousand imitators, and reads particularly well even fifty years after its initial publication. It is not an overstatement to say that this book constitutes a fair percentage of the reasons why we are the way we are today.